Last May, when I
heard that Wael
Ghonim, the Egyptian
revolutionary (and
Google marketing executive)
who had surreptitiously
built the
“We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page that
helped spark the Jan. 25, 2011, uprising, had
signed a $2.25 million book deal with Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt to write a memoir, I
cringed a little. Not because I begrudged
Ghonim a single penny of his seven-figure
advance—which he is donating to Egyptian
charities and the families of the Jan. 25 victims.
But I worried that the pressure to write
a best-seller that could recoup that huge advance
might result in a book tailored to
American readers accustomed to feel-good
stories of individual struggle and success, or
one of those “as told to” memoirs written by
ghostwriters who are good with words but
have little ability to tease out the details of
what makes a revolution possible.

Well, my worries were misguided.
Ghonim’s new book, Revolution 2.0, is a revelation.
Go buy it, read it, and then share it
with a friend. It is a careful and thoughtful
retelling of the roots of Egypt’s uprising and
the nuts and bolts of Ghonim’s online organizing,
as well as an inspiring illustration of
a trend. That is, how a new generation that
is growing up networked keeps spawning
“free radicals”—people who teach themselves
how to use technology to build community,
share powerful messages, and ultimately
weave movements for social change.
Ghonim is just the most famous of a list of
net-native activists who have figured out
how this Internet thing can tip the scales
their way.

Ghonim is quick to admit that the Internet
changed his life. In 1998, as he was starting his studies at Cairo University, he created
a website called IslamWay.com, “to help
Muslims network with one another.” It was a
hub for sharing audio recordings of religious
sermons, “featuring a complete range of
moderate Islamic opinions.” Two years after
its launch, the website had tens of thousands
of daily users and was curated by more than
80 volunteers. Ghonim eventually donated it
to an American Islamic foundation to maintain.
I mention this bit of biographical history
for only one reason: It shows that a full
decade before Ghonim turned his
challenging the Mubarak regime,
he was already an online community
organizer.

Ghonim’s first foray into Facebook
organizing was to support
Mohamed ElBaradei, a former top
UN official who became an outspoken
critic of Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak. Ghonim
created a fan page for ElBaradei that grew to
more than 150,000 members, but ElBaradei’s
reliance on mainstream media and cautious
approach to opposition politics also left
Ghonim frustrated by the pace of change.

Then, on June 8, 2010, he writes, “while
browsing on Facebook, I saw a shocking image
that a friend of mine has posted on my
wall.” It was an image of Khaled Said, a
28-year-old who two days earlier was pulled
from an Internet cafe and beaten to death
by the secret police. Ghonim found himself
in tears and decided he could not “stand by
passively in the face of such grave injustice.”
Instead of publishing the news of Said’s killing
on ElBaradei’s Facebook page, which he
felt could be seen as exploiting the death for
one politician’s gain, he decided to create a
new Facebook page devoted to Said.

And here is where Ghonim’s tale starts
to get really interesting for Net activists. He
quickly discovered that there already was a
page called “My Name is Khaled Mohamed
Said,” but it was run by political activists
whose discourse Ghonim found too confrontational
to become mainstream. Instead,
Ghonim called his page “We Are All
Khaled Said” and started writing in colloquial
Arabic, avoiding language that average
Egyptians wouldn’t use. Within a single
hour, the page had 3,000 followers. By its
third day it had 100,000.

Ghonim details several strategies he employed
to engage page members directly and
convince them to become more active. One
was to ask people to photograph themselves
holding a paper sign saying “Kullena Khaled
Said”; hundreds did so, helping personify the
movement. Another was to rely on page
members to promote protest events, like a
series of “Silent Stand” rallies that
were designed to be visual evocations,
not provocations.

Ghonim’s story eventually
moves from the virtual world of
Facebook, to the tumultuous
days of the Jan. 25 revolution, to
his arrest by the secret police.
The memoir culminates with the
heady night in Tahrir Square
when Mubarak finally stepped
down from power, touching only glancingly
on government efforts to trick and co-opt
Ghonim and other members of Egypt’s
youth movement, and saying little about the
unfinished business that remains.

But even if Ghonim’s (and Egypt’s) story
is unfinished, the value of online organizing
seems conclusively settled by the events of
last year. As he writes in an epilogue,
“thanks to modern technology, participatory
democracy is becoming a reality. Governments
are finding it harder and harder to
keep their people isolated from one another,
to censor information, and to hide corruption
and issue propaganda that goes unchallenged.
Slowly but surely, the weapons of
mass oppression are becoming extinct.”

At the same time, Ghonim is not a
techno-utopian. After a recent talk at Harvard
University, I asked him whether activists
should trust Facebook, which shut
down the Khaled Said page at a critical moment.
“I don’t personally trust any tool,” he
said. “I trust the people behind the tool.”
And that remains the most important lesson
of Revolution 2.0. Technology is just an
enabler. It is what people decide to do with
it that matters most.

Micah L. Sifry is editorial director of Personal Democracy Media, which produces the annual Personal Democracy Forum and the daily news site techPresident.com, both of which focus on how technology is changing politics, government, and civic life.

Is “collective impact” just a buzzword, or does it actually make an impact? Sarah Stachowiak of ORS Impact and Lauren Gase of Spark Policy Institute summarize eight important findings from a study examining collective impact’s effect on institutions, populations, and environments across 25 initiatives in the U.S. and Canada. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/does_collective_impact_really_make_an_impact

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